Happily Never After

 From Of Home and Womanhood:

When Sex and the City first aired, it was marketed as revolutionary, four women, unapologetically single, talking about sex like men. It was supposed to be the end of repression, the dawn of honesty. Finally women being liberated to do and become exactly whoever they wanted to be, finally women were free to become truly happy.

**Spoiler. It didn’t work.**

It wasn’t a story about women finding freedom. It was a story about women mistaking disconnection for independence, while trying to convince themselves it’s empowerment.

The show baptized feminism’s third act: the one where the revolution no longer had a goal, only momentum. Where “liberation” meant endless autonomy, endless choice, endless self-focus. The finish line had finally been reached. Feminism had conquered and women finally could be themselves. It took the feminist script reject tradition, reject dependence, reject limits, and tried to convince all of us how this meant a life of luxury and accomplishments.

Carrie Bradshaw became the ideal post-feminist woman: romantic but cynical, independent, sexually liberated but spiritually lost. Her life was a carousel of pursuit without arrival, intimacy without union, reflection without growth. She wasn’t building anything; she was collecting experiences. She was feminism’s perfect consumer, always searching, never satisfied. (Read more.)